Posted on 06/02/2018 4:58:28 AM PDT by Kaslin
“There’s no politics here ….In fact, there's no clear no evidence that Hemingway was a Castro enthusiast, or critic, says Sandra Spanier, an English professor at Penn State University who is the editor of the Hemingway Letters Project. "He felt that it was important, as a guest living in another country, that he be apolitical," Spanier said in an interview.” (Los Angeles Times story on the restoration of Ernest Hemingway’s mansion Finca Vigia near Havana, Cuba, May 30.)
Got it, amigos? According to the Los Angeles Times a former KGB agent living in a KBG-founded and mentored Soviet satrapy while singing its praises makes him antiseptically “apolitical.”
What?....some of you weren’t aware that declassified Soviet documents proved that Ernest Hemingway officially signed up with the KGB as “Agent Argo” in 1941?
Well, don’t take it from me. After all I’m a “rabidly right-wing Cuban exile!” Instead take it from the crypto-commie (but well-sourced) UK Guardian.
But you just loved The Old Man and the Sea? And especially Gary Cooper as Robert Jordan and Ingrid Bergman as Maria in For Whom the Bell Tolls? So you just can't bring yourself to believe something so shockingly repulsive about one of your favorite authors Ernest Hemingway?
OK, fine. I understand. Then try this: “According to transcripts of NKVD files prepared by a Russian historian who subsequently fled to the West, Hemingway “was recruited for our work on ideological grounds” by an operative named Jacob Golos.”
Turns out that Papa failed pathetically at his KGB assignment. But hey, it’s the thought that counts! And the thought was to be a member of the most murderous organization in modern history during its most murderous phase. (Stalin’s NKVD under Lavrenti Beria.) A singular honor, surely!
“There’s no clear no evidence that Hemingway was a Castro enthusiast,” sniffs the Los Angeles Times. Oh, really? Well chew on these a bit:
“Castro’s revolution is very pure and beautiful. I’m encouraged by it. The Cuban people now have a decent chance for the first time. The Cubans getting shot all deserve it.” (Ernest Hemingway, 1960.)
Quite fittingly, when Soviet diplomat Anastas Mikoyan finished his courtesy calls on Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in Havana in 1960—this long-time Stalin and Beria confidant made it a point to call on Ernest Hemingway. Papa’s antiseptically “apolitical” attitudes obviously influenced the Stalinist Soviet diplomat on this mission.
Hemingway knew full well what was going on behind the scenes of Castro and Che’s “pure and beautiful” revolution. Accounts of "Papa” Hemingway’s eager presence at many of the Katyn-like massacres of untried Cubans comes courtesy of Hemingway's own friend, the late George Plimpton (not exactly an “embittered rabidly right-wing Cuban exile!”) who worked as editor of the Paris Review, (not exactly a "Mc Carthyite scandal sheet.")
In 1958 George Plimpton interviewed Hemingway in Cuba for one of the Paris Review’s most famous pieces. They became friends and the following year Hemingway again invited Plimpton down to his Finca Vigiajust outside Havana. An editor at The Paris Review during the 1990’s, while relating how this high-brow publication passed on serializing the manuscript that became Che Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries, reveals “Papa’s” unwitting role in the rejection.
“I took the paper-clipped excerpt upstairs to the Boss (Plimpton),” writes James Scott Linville, “and said I had something strange and good. As I started to tell him about it, his smile faded. I stopped my pitch and said, "Boss, what's the matter?"
"James, I'm sorry." Linville recalls Plimpton replying. A sad look came over him, and he said, "Years ago, after we'd done the interview, Papa invited me down again to Cuba. It was right after the revolution. “There's something you should see,” Hemingway told Plimpton while preparing a shaker of drinks for the outing.
“They got in the car with a few others and drove some way out of town.” Continues Linville (who is recalling Plimpton’s account.) “They got out, set up chairs and took out the drinks, as if they were going to watch the sunset. Soon, a truck arrived. This, explained George, was what they'd been waiting for. It came, as Hemingway knew the same time each day. It stopped and some men with guns got out of it. In the back were a couple of dozen others who were tied up. Prisoners.
“The men with guns hustled the others out of the back of the truck, and lined them up. Then they shot them. They put the bodies back into the truck.”
And so it started. Within a few years 16,000 men and boys (some of them U.S. citizens) would fill mass graves after scenes like the ones that so charmed Papa Hemingway with his thermos of specially-prepared Daiquiris. The figure for the Castroite murder tally is not difficult to find. Simply open "The Black Book of Communism," written by French scholars and published in English by Harvard University Press (neither exactly an outpost of “embittered rabidly right-wing Cuban exiles!”)
"The facts and figures are irrefutable. No one will any longer be able to claim ignorance or uncertainty about the criminal nature of Communism," wrote the New York Times (no less!) about "The Black Book of Communism."
“Pure and beautiful” indeed, Mr “apolitical” Hemingway.
Damn
I had to have my class read hemingway and fitzgerald. I chose ‘old man...’ and an excerpt fron gatsby (that was enough)
The ninth grade boys said old man was boring and weird. I said ya, agree. Pointless.
Just saying.
KGB having been formed in 1954, this wasn’t possible. Perhaps the MGB or SMERSH.
More likely the NKVD.
Wasn’t a “reforming”, just a badge change, all same, same.
Say Chekist in USSR at any period even up to current day and everyone knows what you mean.
So many of the “important writers” are accorded that distinction simply because they were/are Leftists.
Oldest son had to read “Catcher in the Rye” during high school and failed to see the point of it, other than Holden Caulfield was a self-absorbed basket case. I was struck by his insight but, then again, I raised him.
Personally, I can’t abide anything by Arthur Miller.
Hemmingway was a Leftie going back at least to the Spanish Civil War. Anybody who could support the Republican-side after much publicized murders of priests & nuns is certainly a candidate for NKVD recruitment. The fact that he was a falling-down drunk by the ‘50’s prevented any critical look at the actions of a literary legend.
Thank you. As I was reading I saw apparent inconsistencies.
Knowing about some parts of the Hemmingway life not in the public realm, via a friend of his daughters, I have a small glimpse into the real man but it may only be a view of but one aspect.
Hemmingway was apolitical and indifferent. He loved Cuba, only a few hours boat ride from his other home in Key West. The revolution there apparently was not surprising to him and he wished to be left alone. He knew when interviewed, interrogated, questioned or snooped on by Batista or Castro supporters, that to maintain his peace he felt he had to tell them what they wanted to hear but in a manner of an old man who was just a hermit of sorts.
Hemmingway had been in war before, knew it to be pointless in ways, delivering needless death, filled with irrational attitudes. He wanted no part of it. He wanted to be left alone.
There are many accounts of Hemmingway written contemporaneously in Key West. He would walk down its streets in his fish blood stained ragged shorts to the bars and at the bar complain about his wives that took all his money. He was a regular Joe who just happened to be a fabled author who came into money which his wives and girlfriends helped themselves to. He was known to avoid talks of politics and preferred to talk about cigars, fishing, seasons, women. He was not a radical, a revolutionary, closet or otherwise, at least to the people that saw him several times a week.
He changed literature, but I don’t think artistic greatness is an excuse for moral turpitude, as some do.
Besides, not all agree on his greatness. Easy to copy, so he started a movement, minimalism, but one literary friend of mine described him as a monosyllabic moron.
Hemingway had fantasies of being a spy in WW2 Havana. His efforts centered around he and some friends taking his boat out with a few weapons and searching for U Boats. The American Embassy gave him minimal support until it became clear that these excursions were really an excuse to get drunk and his reports were pure fiction. I wonder if his efforts for the Russians were equally reliable.
Hemingway’s stuff was flat stupid I decided when I discovered Robert Ruark.
This article does not give the full picture:
Hemingway was in periodic contact with the Soviet foreign intelligence service—the NKVD (the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs)—while at the same time in contact with and informally assisting both the US Navy Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) and, following the invasion of France in June 1944, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). The question that Reynolds poses throughout the book is, “Who was in charge of this relationship?” By the time the reader finishes the book, the only reasonable answer is, “Ernest Hemingway was in charge.”
He was an entrepreneurial adventurer that used his contacts IRL to get stories for his writing.
11 page article:
It is impossible to know; there is just not enough information, and that situation is unlikely to change unless his entire NKVD file becomes accessible or previously unknown Hemingway letters come to light. We are left with the irony that four organizations that could not agree on much—the NKVD, OSS, FBI, and Department of State—all arrived separately at the same conclusion: Ernest Hemingway may have wanted to be a spy, but he never lived up to his potential.
https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol.-56-no.-2/pdfs/Reynolds-Hemingway%20A%20Dubious%20Spy.pdf
Dang, I didn’t know Hemingway was a communist. That has been suppressed rather well.
He wrote some good stuff - other than that, who really cares about what else he was now that he’s been moldering in the ground?
Thanks for posting this link!:
The NY Slimes never viewed any communist mass killer as a bad guy. The link below covers their love and following of Fidel Castro for decades.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/26/world/americas/fidel-castro-timeline.html
Sandra Spanier. Wife of former President of PSU Graham Spanier:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Spanier
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